An army marches on its stomach – well so, it turns out, do students. One of the first things we showed prospective parents on open days was the dining room. It wasn’t about showing off the architecture, or the nice windows, or even talking about how well your allergies were catered for – it was about telling them about the little lunchtime rituals that gave your house its character, about the prefects who chewed toast over their essays late in to the night while the Lower Fifth clamoured for help with their Hamlet essays, and about pointing out the names of your friends on the trophies, shields and honorary placards.

The dining hall is large and characterful enough to be full of memories and stories, particularly when its inhabited almost full-time by something that could be an army if you gave us enough sharp sticks and pointed us at something worthy of being whacked with them.

So here, dear friends, are is a tale from this cavern of wonders that has stuck with me long after I left the dining hall – and the memories – behind.

– – – – –

Imagine the scene: it’s the first week of term, and your first time taking the reins on the most prominent of your Sixth Form duties – serving food at the head of the lunchtime table.

I am far from the world’s most co-ordinated human being, and just to spite me, we were dealing with one of the slipperiest meals known to schoolgirl kind. Spaghetti bolognaise. Or, as I thought of it, Slippery Oily Splishy Splashy Deathtrap.

Clutching the tongs in one hand and a ladle the size of a small county in the other, I braced myself for the arrival of my foe. Being the first week of term, of course, the Lower Fifth were just beginnng to catch onto their duties of fetching the food, and so things were a little chaotic between the tables; chairs were dodged, legs were tangled, and fingers were burned from underestimating just how hot the “hot plates” were.

Everyone knows it is the sworn duty of Responsible Sixth Former to remain an achorage of calm and decorum in the midst of this madness, so I tucked my chair in, and opened up a conversation with a new student about how she was finding her first day.

Then, quite suddenly, the world turned to squidge.

Unbeknownst to me, I had not quite pulled my chair in far enough, and one of the Lower Fifth had lost her footing in the gap – and with it, her grip on a pot of warm, oily spaghetti.

I would attempt to describe the scene, but sadly it would be purely an imaginary construct, for it was a rather deep pan, and rather a lot of spaghetti. All I was aware of at the time was the sudden outward rush of stunned, horrified, and (on the part of the perpetrator) monumentally embarrassed silence.

Quite calmly, I prized the pot off my head, set it on the table … and proceeded to sit there looking faintly confused for a few minutes while my ex-lunch slithered down the back of my shirt.

It was only when I skittered out of the dining hall on my way to a shower that I heard the laughter begin. Some even had enough energy left to giggle when I returned twenty minutes later.

The event was clearly even more momentous than I gave it credit for, for not only was it the talk of the house – and a deeply mortifying running joke – for just short of a week, but the event was immortalised in that year’s Christmas house skit, with a real pot of spahetti being upended over the bonce of the very Lower Fifth who had administered that unfortunate fate to me several months before.

Revenge may be a dish served cold, but there’s no matching the lukewarm and slightly-clingy glory of an immortalised embarrassment.

Sorry everyone. Deadlines happened, and then I had to drive back to Germany, and then the clocks went forward by two hours and nearly turned me fully into the nocturnal half-vampire I have been trying not to become since 3 in the morning became my bedtime during the term.

It’s the holidays now, though, joy of joys … but sadly it is also the Easter holidays, which are not so much holiday as they are a period spent at home grumbling that your holiday has been repurposed as an extended revision session.

Miriam is embarking upon that great challenge of A Levels this year, with a place at Somewhere Most Prestigious to aim for – can I get some good luck wishes for her in the comments? – and I am scrabbling inanely at the revision for my two exams. Mine aren’t all that strenuous, this being the great ‘meh’ that is Freshers’ Year, but between them and all the activities that holidays require, I’m a little strapped for time, too.

One of these activities is, of course St Mallory’s 2. The draft is presently in my possession, and slowly gaining size. Emphasis on the slowly. But size it is gaining. Wheeeee!

The good news is, though I shall be absent for a few days impending, I shall be able to bring some nice things to the blog in return! These may include pictures, or more anecdotes, or just about anything you please.

Yes, I would like your opinion. What sort of thing would you guys like to see on the St Mallory’s blog? Leave a comment, and let us know!

In the meantime, I’d better get to my lunch. And try not to set it on fire like I did yesterday.

It may not come as a surprise to many, but I have a seriously large bone to pick with films like Wild Child. An entire skeleton’s worth, in fact – it lives in the closet, sitting underneath the shelf that houses enough axes-to-be-ground to arm a large Viking raiding party and still leave some spare to prop open the doors on the way out.

Released in 2008, Wild Child did reasonably well at the box office – it currently sports a score of 6.0 on IMDB – though not well enough to leave much of a wake. The inclusion of Alex Pettyfer was about the most notable thing taken away by my dorm-mates, with whom I watched the film on a boring Sunday night in 2010.

To all intents and purposes, it’s a very typical sort of mainstream Hollywood outlet – spoiled teenage brat taken away from her standard environment to learn important life lessons / overcome challenges / acquire unrealistically attractive boyfriend in a kookily bizarre new environment.

It even comes with a tagline pun so hsameful they tried to hide it just above the credits. “A New Term for Trouble”? Dear oh dear oh dear.

Miriam told me she watched this film for research purposes before we got started on St Mallory’s Forever!, along with the new St Trinian’s film – which, fun fact, our publisher Mark hates in the same way most people hate Nickelback, or getting teeth pulled with pliers made of cacti – which is what got me thinking about it.

I’m not going to rag on about its inaccuracies (there aren’t enough hours in the world) or indulge my love of ripping apart trope-laden Hollywood output for my own glee. I can appreciate the demand for silly, fluffy films of this sort, and sometimes I can even enjoy them.

But what I’m not going to let it get away with is its lack of research. Oh yes, dear readers. This is going to be a post about research. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, don’t forget to wipe your feet on the way in, yadda yadda.

In order to create a polar opposite environment for Spoiled Protagonist Princess (also known as Poppy but that’s irrelevant), the film created an antithetical environment in the form of the boarding school. They did pretty well from the outset – I know at least three people who came from an “Abbey Mount”, and none of them from the same county – and conjuring up some strict teachers to act as barriers. The layout of the dorms, involvement of lacrosse, the fact that one of the staff actually had family living on campus, also were great elements that could be used to the plot’s advantage.

However … it was clear none of the producers or writers or cast members had ever set foot in a real boarding school. And they missed out on so many more things that could have made a mildly amusing chick-flick into an absolute gut-buster. I’ll break it down for you.

What They Did Have:

Pranks

The ramifications of sneaking out after lights out

The joys of raiding charity shops

An alarmingly accurate representation of how most people usually score goals in lacrosse.

All of these have their place, of course, but all were seriously underplayed in favour of harping on about the ‘untouchability’ of the Single Male Character Present Ergo Love Interest and the bitchiness of the stereotypical cardboard cut-out bully.

If one of the crew had decided to take a look at an actual school, here’s what they could have got from that list.

What They Might Have Had:

Hilariously awkward socials, involving bussing over a load of boys from a school up to twenty miles away just so the students get some socialisation.

Interplay and development between the characters, based on the extremely close friendships that can only be formed by sleeping in one room for the better part of a year.

More staff involvement – from matrons to groundskeepers to house staff. They’re people too, and they’re often the source of half he mischief we get into.

The joys of confronting an American student with Latin, Greek, or any of the other dead languages that tend to cause unsuspecting newcomers to stare at the page as if it’s going to try and eat them.

New girls’ rituals. Mine featured a cold shower, a musical number, and an everlasting mistrust of curtain rails.

Language mixups! If you thought coming from America to Britain was bad, add in a layer of bizarreness unique to antiquated bubbles of private education and you’ve got a recipe for hilarity.

Of course, this is very much a case of supposition rather than one tailored to Wild Child in particular. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that a film with as much potential as this one fell so flat on its face simply because a little more research was not put in to find the really juicy gems that might have saved it a real critical shredding. It’s not often Rotten Tomatoes produces something quite so scathing as: “This tween comedy mess falls flat on its face due to poor characters, poor direction and poor jokes.”

What about you, readers? If you’ve seen Wild Child, what did you make of it? And if you haven’t, what do you make of filmic research on the whole? Leave a comment, and let me know!

At the end of Chapter 50 of St Mallory’s Forever!, there lurks an innocuous reference to just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in a comic YA mystery set among the hi-jinx of an all-girls boarding school.

Someone got themselves locked in the gardening shed a couple of years back, and there was complete pandemonium until she turned up in the dining hall about an hour later.

Fun fact: that’s not an amusing comic interlude invented purely for a quick giggle and a pleasant sense of irony. It’s a true story.

One of mine, actually. And here’s how it happened.

Back in the Upper Fourth (Year 8 to all you ‘normal’ people out there), someone decided it would be a good idea to have one of our Latin lessons swapped out, bi-weekly, for an hour spent in the greenhouse out the back of the boarding houses. Why this decision was made – and why the first lessons began in the frostiest November since Jack Frost went on a year-long bender – I will never know.

I’ll confess here and now that I’m no great horticulturalist (read: wouldn’t know her geraniums from her marigolds on a good day), but the lessons themselves weren’t so bad. We never actually managed to grow anything, but it was nice to get outside and have a chance to talk about something other than the finer points of Ovid for an hour.

This particular debacle fell in about the fifth week of term. As was my wont, I had been relegated to digging bulbs out of what we hoped would become the tomato patch, and so was rather keen to rid myself of dirt and debris before heading off for lunch.

The sink in the greenhouse stood behind the door. Yes, there was a sink in the greenhouse. Yes, it was strange. Yes, it was bizarrely placed.

Yes, I blame the sink for everything.

Sorry, I digress. I was at the sink, washing my hands and contemplating the prospect of the lasagne waiting for me in the dining room. So engrossed was I in these mouth-watering fantasies, that I did not hear the fateful click. The click, that is, of a key exiting a lock.

By the time I turned back to the door, teacher and class both had vanished, and I was stuck.

What followed was a fairly bizarre thirty minute interlude of jumping up and down in the middle of the greenhouse (hoping to get the attention of the lunchgoers through the window in the boarding house beside the gardening patch), searching in vain for something to use as a lock pick, using anything I could find in the hopes it would make a decent lock pick, discovering that trying to take the lock apart with a screwdriver was no more useful than the previous strategy … and charging the door with a pitchfork.

The last option came to me purely in the hopes that the sound would carry to the grounds staff clipping the hedges off the main road. It didn’t work, but it made me feel a lot better. From what I can tell, the marks were still in the door until the greenhouse was taken down last year.

In the end, I resorted to James Bonding it out of a window – a highly inelegant process, given that I was fairly tall for a 12-year-old and the window was not designed with escape attempts in mind.

The best part of the story? There had not been any debacle whatsoever over my disappearance. On the contrary, no one had even noticed I had gone. I’d been ticked off on the lunch register on the assumption I’d gone to wash my hands – oh the irony – and no one had thought to wonder why the dining room was so oddly quiet.

Suffice to say it was a bit of a surprise for all involved when I came talking in an hour later and declared to the room at large: “I’ve been locked in the garden shed for forty five minutes!”

I did not notice the innaccuracy of my measurement of time. What I did notice, just a moment too late, was that there were three people sitting at my housemistress’ side at the main table. Two parents, and an eight-year-old prospective student.

The fact that I was taken out of the room and sternly told off for upsetting the guests seems reasonable, but I was still rather indignant about it. It wasn’t exactly my fault, after all.

Suffice to say, it was no great surprise to anyone that these gardening lessons were discontinued at the end of that year.

Curse that conniving sink.

* * *

Well, what do you make of that, readers? Reckon any of your stories, from school days or otherwise, can match up to the strangeness factor of The Great Shed Debacle?

There are, of course, plenty more little easter eggs just like this one lurking behind many a line of St Mall’s. Reckon you can spot any more? Suggest them in the comments, and I might just make a little series out of them. Or I might just do that anyway, because I think they’re funny.

I should probably be taken out and stoned for that awful title, but I wasn’t about to let Miriam have all the fun with puns. I regret nothing!

We’ve had success with promotion across a great many boards – including BBC Radio Interviews, spots on innumerable blogs, and even a feature in Ebook Bargains UK. Still, there’s nothing quite like seeing yourself plastered over a full-page spread in a proper newspaper, is there?

This is, of course, my university newspaper – which you’ve got to get hold of very fast, lest they all vanish from their bins before you can get your grubby paws on one. What’s even better is that they’re free, meaning a curious student with an hour to kill between lectures is far more likely to pick it up, rather than spending their scant money filling their ever-growling belly (speaking from experience, this happens more than you’d think).

If you’d like to read the article – which includes ramblings about the process of co-authoring, organisation, and an explanation of mine and Miriam’s love-hate-eternal-torment draft-swapping lives, you can read it in the transcript HERE!

‘St Mallory’s Forever!’ Trivia: Episode 1 ~ In which Miriam takes you ‘behind the scenes’ for some trivia and amusing information about book one.

Warning: this post may include mild spoilers for St Mallory’s Forever! for those who haven’t yet read/finished it.

If you’ve read the reviews of St Mall’s that have been left on Amazon and Goodreads (some are excerpted on the “St Mallory’s Forever page and in the right-hand sidebar of this blog, which I redesigned because I was procrastinating on writing a Classics essay last week. Which, for the record, is also what I’m doing right now), you’ll see that a lot of people have commented on our use of geek culture etc throughout the story. It’s true – there are overt references to Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Star Trek, among other things. There are also covert ones, and most of them relate to Tim Morrigan.

I’m responsible for naming him. This wasn’t a deliberate decision – we didn’t sit down and say, “Hey, Miriam, do you want to invent the antagonist of book one?” (Collaboration over distance means I don’t think we ever ‘sat down’ and discussed anything, although Charley and I did meet up in the summer and we talked about book two then.) I don’t even remember if he was originally meant to play the role he played: I think we had some inkling that he’d be a significant ‘baddie’, but nothing concrete.

So his introduction happened to fall in a chapter that I wrote, which meant I needed to name him. He’s introduced to us as Tim Morrigan, but as those who have read the book will know, he is also known as Ben Phillips. For the benefit of those who haven’t, or haven’t yet got that far, I won’t go into the details of how that came to be – simply why those names were chosen in the first place.

And it’s at this point that I display what a total nerd I am, since his name is actually a threefold joke.

Joke one: it’s a play on Jim Moriarty.

With all the Sherlock references that went into St Mall’s and the fact that we wrote it at a time when I was working my way through all the Sherlock Holmes books, it seemed like a good plan for the bad guy to evoke the idea of Moriarty. I went with the BBC Sherlock “Jim” instead of “James”, though, and that’s where Tim came from. “Morrigan”, on the other hand, has a similar phonetic structure to “Moriarty” and is also an Irish word.

Joke two: it’s a reference to the Morrigan.

The Morrigan is one part of the Irish triple goddess of war, death, destruction etc. She’s a shape-changer, which is fitting for a devious and mischievous character. She’s associated with general misery, and interacts with the hero Cu Chulainn. Some theories associate her with the Welsh Morgan le Fay, though they don’t have a lot in common, even taking the French ‘Vulgate Cycle’ of Arthurian legends into account.

… I think my nerd is showing. I recently wrote a research project about women in mythology, so I was examining that particular comparison. Don’t worry if that went straight over your heads.

Basically, the Morrigan is a troublemaker, a shapechanger, and a nasty piece of work.

Joke three: it’s another Sherlock reference.

You know we were talking about BBC Sherlock? Well, that means Benedict Cumberbatch is involved. And you see, his full name is Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch, which meant that Tim/Timothy was easily paired with Ben/Benedict. He references his older sister as a factor in the name choice, and given that she’s probably about the age of most Sherlock fangirls, it makes perfect sense that she would have done that deliberately.

I mean, I’m neither confirming nor denying that she did, or that she even likes Sherlock. But it’s a possibility, isn’t it? (The answer is right there in the book, if you’re looking for it. I was wondering if the others would notice.)

Okay, but what about Phillips?

I don’t remember where the Phillips came from. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t motivated by a desire to include the dreadful amazing pun in the title of chapter 64 (or 65 if we ever fix the fact there are two chapter 12s in that edition, hee hee): “IT’S PHILLIPS, TIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT.” Being, of course, an extra-nerdy joke on the Star Trek quote, “It’s Physics, Jim, but not as we know it.”

Like I said, pretty sure that wasn’t the motivation – just a result that I was very pleased with. I remember sending Charley that chapter and babbling incoherently about the title because I was unbelievably proud of myself, despite knowing that 90% of people wouldn’t even pick up on my genius.

She appreciated it, though.

It might have been that it went well with Morrigan, because it does. It might have been an entirely random name plucked from the ether. Possibly I was looking at my bookshelves and saw the Mortal Engines quartet by Philip Reeve – I have a habit of naming characters after authors. Helen and her mother both owe their surname to Jonathan Stroud, as it seemed appropriate and fit well with both their names, and it’s probably just as well nobody else’s surnames were left up to me or we’d have an entire library of them.

Notably, Philip Reeve and Jonathan Stroud used to be on the same bookshelf which was opposite my desk, although it’s now moved, and I think they were named at about the same time, so I’m going to assume that’s the reason. It’s not quite as entertaining as the rest of his name, but hey, we got four jokes out of it and that’s fairly good going for a single character.

This has been St Mallory’s Forever! trivia. Next time, I’ll probably be talking about Helen, unless there’s anything else you want to know – in which case, please feel free to leave comments!

Would you look at that! Not only does Miriam manage to regenerate the blog’s theme, earn us five more followers – hello lovely people! – but she also manages to do it with a magnificent pun in the title!

Well then. I suppose I’d better follow her illustrious example and reintroduce myself, for the benefit of you awesome people who might have forgotten exactly who this strange human is that’s been gabbling at you through the interwebs for the past two weeks.

So… who the blazes are you?

Here I am in 2012! Looking relatively sane in a picture for once.

I’m Charley Robson; student, geek, sausage enthusiast, and author.

I’m the middle installment of the St Mallory’s arrangement, and currently halfway through my first year as an undergraduate of BA English at Exeter University. I’d make a joke about selling my soul to the government to pay off my student fees… but I’m pretty sure I never had one. A soul, that is. More on that later.

What are you doing here?

As the content of my previous posts has likely made obvious, I’m the member of this triumvirate who actually attended a boarding school. Like St Mallory’s, it was a small, single-sex establishment lurking in the idyllic English countryside, and absolutely chock-full of all the charmingly bizarre things you expect of such a place.

Little known fact: my history in education is more akin to Xuan’s than anyone else’s. The boarding school where I concluded my education was the last in a long succession of educational establishments – at least nine, at the last count – attended by myself as I tumbled in and out of cardboard boxes, following my father’s peripatetic job with the Forces.

Wait … go back to the bit about the soul? That’s to do with writing, isn’t it?

Oddly enough, it is. Though I can’t claim quite the same level of productivity as Miriam when it comes to my own work, what books I have managed to write, despite their wild variations in genre, theme and quality, have all been in unified in revealing that I have a marvellous predilection for cold-hearted murder. And wanton destruction. Sometimes at the same time.

I read pretty voraciously, both prose and poetry, and so my taste in authors is extremely varied; from J.R.R. Tolkien to Terry Pratchett, and Lord Byron and the Romantics to Shakespeare and back again, with a detour via Cicero and Scott Lynch if you fancy stopping for a coffee. I’m a great believer in reading, at least partially, as a form of escaping the dull and difficult fish bowl of reality for somewhere much more exciting and/or deadly. Preferably both.

As a result, I would call the majority of my non-St-Mallory’s projects ‘fantasy’, some of a more traditional sort than others. Mostly, though, I aim for interesting characters, engrossingly complex plots, shameless escapism, and making Miriam cry. Don’t feel sorry for her. She does exactly the same thing to me.

Okay … so what else do you do, when not writing?

A more recent picture, from November last year. There are an alarming number of pictures of me with silly things on my head.

Unlike Miriam, I have the musical talent of a particularly dim pigeon – but that didn’t stop me taking to the stage, playing nought but villainous nasties and nasty villains since about the age of nine.

I did, admittedly, take singing lessons for a year, but despite having a top range that makes Alvin and the Chipmunks sound like deep-throated baritones, I’ve got nothing on Freddie Mercury.

Beyond that, I’m usually found indulging my not-so-inner voracious geek. You know you’re a proper geek when you’re on the committee for the Tolkien society, helping to arrange a trip to Rivendell (or the real-life inspiration for it, anyway). I’m also a fan of Doctor Who, Game of Thrones (yes, I’ve read the books. Yes, it gets worse.), Merlin, or just about anything that will present me with some nice historical weapons to drool over.

I have a thing for catapults. Don’t judge me.

Of course, when I’m not feeling up to braving the terrors of the wet and windy outside world, you will probably find me lurking about on…
– My Blog
– My Facebook Page
– My YouTube channel

That’s all from me this week! I’ll be back again in the near future – stay tuned!